Review: Why You've Probably Never Heard of James Garfield's Assassin

The Death by Lightning miniseries dramatizes the assassination of a president who left little lasting impact on Americans' lives.

Mike Makowsky opens Death by Lightning, a four-part miniseries he wrote and produced, with a chilling line: "This is a true story about two men the world forgot. One was the 20th president of the United States. The other shot him." Yet this drama about President James Garfield and assassin Charles Guiteau reminds us that we should wish for more forgettable presidents.

Garfield, played by Michael Shannon, is depicted as a quiet, reserved statesman who reluctantly becomes the Republican nominee only after a unifying speech vaults him above party factions. As the political drama unfolds, the series shows glimpses of Guiteau's increasingly erratic life and the strange ways he keeps crossing paths with Garfield on the road to a fateful morning at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station where Guiteau shot Garfield.

Unlike John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, Guiteau is largely forgotten—not because his crime was trivial, but because he shot a president who left little lasting impact on Americans' lives. Though Guiteau fascinated the public during his trial and execution, and his brain even spent time on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, he and Garfield are both footnotes in history—and that's for the best. Politicians (and political violence) shouldn't take up permanent space in our heads.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

The big takeaway from the series is always trust the medical experts.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

But they bled him and gave him plenty of mercury!

[LIBtranslator]

True. All the parasite did was shoot Garfield. He didn't even perjure himself claiming the doctors--jabbing the victim's wound with unwashed fingers--were the ones that really killed him. Then again, Garfield's Red Republican party had its humble beginnings translating and publishing the Communist Manifesto over in Merrie Olde before the disease spread to These Sovereign States. Karma gets them most every time.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Garfield had a respectable pre-Presidential career, and as to his Presidential career...he didn't have much of one, due to his murder early in his term

Although Guiteau was not really right in the head, the jury didn't think he was *legally* insane, so he was hanaged.

To commemorate Garfield, people used to stick dolls of him on the back windows of their cars.*

*No, not really, that was a different Garfield.

[Cloudbuster]

Maybe it was the efficient hanging that keeps him from being talked about. Guilty. Executed. F'd around and Found Out.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Wikipedia says: "He was found guilty on January 25, 1882, and sentenced to death."

Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882.

A revolving door system, except he was dead when he came out the door.

(They would have kept the body buried in the prison yard, but lest they be accused of collaborating with souvenir - hunters, the prison authorities sent the corpse to a museum).

[Chocolatejeebus]

Jeeze, no spoiler alert?

[Rick James]

Review: Why You've Probably Never Heard of James Garfield's Assassin

Dude, I've barely heard of either of Trump's assassins... you think I'm going to be hip to something that happened almost 200 years ago?

[Uomo Del Ghiaccio]

President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, but was killed by the incompetent Doctor Willard Bliss and his filthy fingers and probes. If Doctor Willard Bliss's ego was not so ever-present and listened to and not rejected Doctor Joseph Lister about the importance to sterilized hands and tools, then President James Garfield would have likely survived the assassination attempt. The constant probing of President James Garfield's wounds by Doctor Willard Bliss filthy fingers and dirty tools are the cause of President James Garfield death.

[LIBtranslator]

Guiteau--the communist anarchist wanker--inspired fully half of the whack jobs struggling to infiltrate the LP slate of candidates. All over the world the minute a communist actually bombed, firebugged or shot someone, that worthy was by definition transubstantiated into rarefied heights of fame. Not often enough the uplift was at the end of a hemp rope, for bootheads and pony boys to this day serve the Kleptocracy by helping it depict libertarians as bushwhacking anarchists.

[MWAocdoc]

James Abram Garfield was my seventh cousin four times removed. We had to remove him the fourth time because he survived the Civil War but couldn't survive the White House.